Title Page
TOKYO
A Cultural and Literary History
by
Stephen Mansfield
Publisher Information
First published in 2009 by
Signal Books Limited
36 Minster Road
Oxford OX4 1LY
www.signalbooks.co.uk
Digital Edition converted and published in 2011 by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
© Stephen Mansfield, 2009
Foreword © Paul Waley
The right of Stephen Mansfield to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. The whole of this work, including all text and illustrations, is protected by copyright. No parts of this work may be loaded, stored, manipulated, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information, storage and retrieval system without prior written permission from the publisher, on behalf of the copyright owner.
Production: Devdan Sen
Cover design: Baseline Arts
Cover images: © Paul Cheyne/istockphoto; Stephen Mansfield
All illustrations: © Stephen Mansfield
Foreword
by Paul Waley
Of all the clichés that help to define life in the world’s largest city none is more persistent than that of the city of constant destruction and rebirth, the destruction inflicted both by natural forces and by the human desire to wring as much money as possible out of urban land. The Tokyo we see today has changed radically from the city of the 1970s, which in turn bears no resemblance at all to the city of the 1920s, and even less to Edo, the capital city of the Tokugawa shoguns. But what does it mean to live in a city where the landscape changes with such frequency and such totality? What is the effect on its residents of living in a city that is so plastic and pliable, where so often it is impossible to find the buildings one remembers from one’s youth?
Tokyo has none of the monuments of the national capitals of Europe, nor of its Asian neighbours. None of its buildings conveys the sense of pride and pomposity of the Invalides in Paris or the monument to Vittorio Emanuele in Rome. You will not find in Tokyo a great open space like Tiananmen or a national monument like the one in Jakarta. There are no palaces - apart from the Imperial Palace, which is, famously, invisible - and the temples and shrines are a far cry from the Sacré-Coeur or Westminster Abbey. Japan’s modern history has involved an uncomfortable relationship with the past. Much of the period has been spent trying to forget the past and to ensure that as few reminders as possible are retained in the urban landscape. No wonder perhaps that the one significant exception is the most controversial site in the city, the Yasukuni Shrine, where the souls of the Japanese war-dead are commemorated.
Lacking this visible aura of a capital city, Tokyo appears to many who visit it as missing a sense of unity and coherence. There is no sense of where the city starts or ends, no centre and no edge. There is no gravitas to the city, and no civitas. Lacking this authoritative script of its own history and without a commemorative urban landscape, Tokyo has no generally accepted aesthetic standards. A landscape law was passed a few years ago, but it has made little difference. Controls on building heights exist, but these are complex and have been vastly relaxed. This is a city where you can build more or less what you like wherever you want to build it.
Tokyo is, in other words, a city that allows you strange freedoms. And the most fundamental of these is perhaps the freedom to read what you will into or onto the city. Everyone makes their own map of the city, creates their own centres and their own peripheries. Because no one imposes a vision of Tokyo on you, you make what you will of the city. And if there are few buildings around to kindle memories of the past, of one’s personal past as well as the city’s past, then the memory gravitates around people more than places. Tokyo is a city about people, ebbing and flooding, great waves of people washing around the buildings, rushing through the channels, and pouring back out again.
Tokyo is not just a city about great numbers of people moving around. It is a city composed of the maps and the memories and the struggles and strategies of its many million inhabitants, as they meet with colleagues, with friends, with soul-mates, with former classmates, and then break off and move on and meet with others. As they do so, they create their own routes around the city, marking here a favourite restaurant, there a bar for a water-cut whiskey. And in the end each individual ends up giving Tokyo the shape that suits and accords with their own lives.
Tokyo is a city, then, where you draw your own map and make your own spaces. And so the spaces of the city are unorthodox, interstitial, hidden away in neglected corners, down stairways, up elevators, and nearly always extremely difficult to find the second time round. They lie round behind the sakaya, the liquor shop, and past the soba noodle restaurant, or down a flight of steps at the bottom of a short, sharp slope. These, not the privileged eyries on the top of its skyscrapers, are the real spaces of the city.
And the stories of Tokyo are just as personal, off-beat, and anecdotal as the spaces. Many of them revolve around the common people of the city and their encounters with ghosts and animals, or they are stories of patience and fortitude in the face of adversity. Some of them have even left their mark on the urban landscape. In what other city of the world does the most celebrated statue represent a dog, Hachikō, who came every day to Shibuya Station to wait for his master? These are the stories that Stephen Mansfield introduces us to here in the pages of this book.
It is a further cliché of the city that places of historical interest are disappearing, destroyed, crushed, swept away. The past is constantly receding. But this has been the pattern for well over a hundred years. Visitors to the city in the 1880s and 1890s were already complaining that the Japanese were westernizing their capital city and in the process destroying their own precious culture. And the plaint has been heard ever since.
We are particularly fortunate therefore to have such a perspicacious guide as Stephen Mansfield. Having lived in Tokyo and written about it for many years, he is able expertly to reflect in these pages the quirky, unpredictable, and multifaceted stories that go to make up the narrative of the city. He interleaves his tale with references to and quotations from both, Japanese writers and non-Japanese visitors to the city. In doing all this, he also conveys a sense of the changing tide of national history.
Preface & Acknowledgments
Henry James once summed up London in just a few words, calling it “the biggest aggregation of human life - the most complete compendium of the world.” The definition could just as easily apply to contemporary Tokyo, the world’s largest, most convulsively changing megalopolis. The city’s writers, artists and designers may be better qualified to interpret Tokyo than its legions of town planners or bureaucrats. Architect Maki Fumihiko, for example, has observed, “The aesthetic that this cityscape generates is one that favors fluctuations, fluidity, and lightness; it suggests the discovery of a new perceptual order.”
If Europeans are overawed by the architecture of the past, convinced that nothing as visionary or accomplished can ever be built again, this is where Tokyo, having none of these convictions or inhibitions, radically deviates, believing that it can improve on the past and produce something more outstanding, or at least more apropos the times. A city so utterly fixated on the present would seem incapable
of producing a culture deeper than the neon script and signage that ripples across its surfaces; yet Tokyo, westernized but insistently Japanese, provides the setting for a culture that is simultaneously ancient and brand new. In an exciting city, full of stories about itself, you can feel a kind of fermentation beneath your feet as you walk its streets, something its writers and artists, eager to see the city’s nooks, crannies and mutations for themselves, have always done. There are few cities where emotional responses to transformations in the urban landscape have been so scrupulously recorded by writers, where literary themes and styles have evolved so directly from memory and observation.
From the very onset, Tokyo was destined to be a city of transformations. A city transfixed on the moment, its unflagging cycles of change have acquired the regularity of tradition. So great is the intensity of change that the city seems at times to be completely severed from its own history. Yet irrespective of the reality that assails the eye, the past is deeply engraved into the fabric of the city. It is these lines of historical continuity, connecting Edo and Tokyo, that this book explores.
***
In order to make structural sense of Tokyo’s relationship to its past, I have chosen to track its cultural and historical development chronologically rather than thematically, though themes continually highlight the text. Japanese names appear throughout this book in their native order, surnames preceding given names. Thus, Kawabata first, rather than Yasunari. In the case of Japanese works of fiction, I have opted in most instances for the ones used in the standard English translations where they exist. Hence, Kafu’s Bokuto Kidan is rendered as A Strange Tale from East of the River. Photographs throughout are my own. Photographs throughout are my own. I have also used images from my collection of Tokyo postcards from the Taisho to early Showa periods. I have tried to be as accurate as possible in the placement of historical events, spellings and dates, where conflicting facts arose during the research for this book. Where matters of literary and historical interpretation are concerned, however, I have only myself to blame.
The imprimatur of several writers marks this work. I have been privileged to read about and hear first-hand Donald Richie’s recollections of a city he has known intimately for more than six decades, to have access to his private photo collection and permission to examine his journals before they were finally published. I am indebted to conversations with the author and journalist Henry Scott-Stokes, another long-time Tokyo resident. Possessed of an infallible memory, Henry was both friend and biographer of Mishima Yukio, one of Japanese literature’s most complex figures.
I would also like to express my gratitude to translators like Donald Keene, Alisa Freedman, Lawrence Rogers, Jay Rubin, Shogo Oketani and Leza Lowitz, who have brought Japanese literature into the English reading realm, and to writers like Paul Waley, who have undertaken translations for their own books. Burritt Sabin, formerly of The East magazine, was an indulgent and generous editor who allowed me to explore Tokyo subjects at will. Alex Hendy at the Japan Journal suggested a long series on Tokyo districts and writers some years ago, which fired up my engines on this subject. I am also indebted to the wonderfully idiosyncratic and detailed Tokyo histories of the late, much missed Edward Seidensticker. Where else could you read that during a pet owning fad introduced in the Meiji era by an enterprising Englishman and his American partner, a person in the Tokyo district of Shitaya “was fined and jailed for staining a white rabbit with persimmon juice”? The two Tokyo books and countless research papers of Paul Waley, great-nephew of that eminent translator of Japanese literature, Arthur Waley, have been invaluable as models of cultural geography. The echoes of Paul’s work reverberate along the walls of this one.
This book is for Kazuko, without whom I would not have lived in Japan long enough to write a book about it.
Introduction
Few people living in the great capitals of Europe in the eighteenth century had any notion that there stood at the other end of the world a city vastly larger in population than any of their own. The fact would doubtless have prompted a similar mockery and incredulity to that with which Venetians greeted Marco Polo’s accounts of imperial China. But such a place existed. This was Edo, the city that foreshadowed Tokyo.
Edo was divided into the Low City areas known as the shitamachi, and the yamanote, or High City. The Low City occupied reclaimed land to the east and south of Edo Castle, a flat river delta of canals and watercourses where merchants, craftsmen, fishermen, actors, and members of the so-called “naked trades” - palanquin carriers, labourers and other lowly occupations - were obliged to live. The warrior class took the elevated ground, the variegated landscapes of the High City, with its natural springs and well-watered gardens.
What the shitamachi lacked in space and comfort it more than made up for as the stage for an expansive cultural life. A source of immense pride to the townspeople, the Low City enjoyed an unrivalled degree of cultural hegemony until the city of Edo became the capital, Tokyo, in 1868. All roads led to Edo. Traffic between the city and the imperial capital of Kyoto passed along the Tokaido, or Eastern Sea Road. Other trunk roads connected the city with the northern, western and southern provinces, vectors along which increasing amounts of goods and skilled workers flowed.
The city underwent great developments at this time, including the rise of a merchant class, who were beginning, to the outrage and stupefaction of the authorities, to express a cautious but nevertheless fractious disrespect for the social hierarchy and the still dangerously unpredictable samurai. The transgression of social codes could result in brutal punishment, but as the city became wealthier and more ostentatious in its tastes, so its people, even the most impoverished, became bolder in their pursuit of pleasure and independence. Although Kyoto remained Japan’s capital until the end of the nineteenth century, Edo was its de facto political centre, the incubator of a vibrant new culture. As such, its self-confidence grew as gifted artists and writers were drawn to the city.
Tokyo today occupies a generous swath of the alluvial Kanto plain in Honshu, the largest and most populous island in the Japanese archipelago.
Situated on the eastern Pacific coast, its main geographic features are its undulating hills to the west, the flatlands to the east and its main watercourse, the Sumida river, running from the north-eastern reaches of the city into Tokyo Bay. The easternmost of the great Asian capitals, it stands alone on the edge of the continent. Sitting above the world’s most geologically unstable terrain, it hangs perilously over an ocean that quickly plunges to depths of 30,000 feet. Almost a quarter of the nation’s population, in excess of thirty million people, live in and around the city, a demographic fact that squarely places Tokyo, the largest capital in the developed world, at the centre of Japan’s political, economic and cultural life.
Infinite and chaotic, its tangled infrastructure and curious spatial combinations apparently impenetrable, its buildings covered in advertisements, ideograms and electronic messaging, the physical setting is immensely complex. In submitting itself to repeated sessions of radical urban surgery and implanting, allowing the scalpel to slice away and dispose of loose tissue, Tokyo’s remodelled surfaces always seem youthful, to have somehow escaped the rigor mortis of older capitals. This is not to say that the contemporary city is without the graduated shading of history. There exists, below the colossal conflation of shapes, a remarkably intact structural core dating from the original city of Edo. A city apparently incapable of producing a culture any deeper than the ripple of neon script that animates its building surfaces is, it turns out, all about depth.
For all its rapacious development, its tireless reinvention of self, Tokyo has a surprising number of green and pleasant places. Thousands of city parks, some spacious, others barely large enough to support a children’s swing, sandpit and bench, grace the city. Edo-period gardens, some almost intact, others greatly reduced in scale, remain immensely impressive. Adding to the greenery are sacred groves located in the grounds of shr
ines, and rows of potted plants outside small wooden houses in the lanes of the city’s older quarters. Flower and plant festivals, many with their roots in the days of Edo, are periodically held in the grounds of temples and parks, which come to life with plum, peony, ground cherry, morning glory and chrysanthemum fairs. Many streets are planted with avenues of gingko and Zelkova, and there are rules requiring residents of new apartment blocks to create rooftop gardens. There is even talk of creating a vast forest along Tokyo Bay. The city’s flora benefits in no small measure from a regular abundance of rain, clear autumn skies, a relatively mild winter and very pleasant spring temperatures, when cherry blossom viewing is succeeded by a keen appreciation of flowering azaleas and wisteria. Tokyo’s sub-tropical summers are quite a different thing. Extreme humidity descends on the city, turning Tokyo nights into steamy nocturnes akin to those of Bangkok or Shanghai.
It is pro forma in introductions to important world cities to describe them as unique or as anomalies. In the case of Tokyo, where the normal standards used to judge cities are largely absent, those terms do seem singularly apposite. With only the scantest traces of a visible past, Tokyo offers little physical evidence of its origins. Its history is in the distillation of its own narrative. Writers who wish to describe the city have to engage in a process of historical reconstruction, relying on prints, paintings, photographs and the accounts of writers and early foreign visitors. Great cities are invariably associated with the work of literary figures that have lived or put in long sabbaticals there. Mary McCarthy is remembered for her boarding days in Venice, Gerald Brenan is associated with Granada, Henry Miller with Paris. With the exception of the American author Donald Richie, who will surely be recalled as Tokyo’s pre-eminent muse, the man who took on the task of cultural interpreter for a megalopolis that defiantly resists such categorization, few foreign writers or artists of note have taken up permanent residence in Tokyo. Many have lingered beyond their intended stays, however, allowing the city to exert its influence on them.
Tokyo: A Cultural and Literary History (Cities of the Imagination Book 34) Page 1